In-house training, the new mantra

Catch them young and make them grow with you is the new mantra, says this rediff item.

- Dilip

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Source: www.rediff.com

In-house training, the new mantra

Barkha Shah in Hyderabad

July 07, 2006 02:37 IST

Catch them young, seems a half-baked ideology today. A refurbished mantra that has caught the fancy of IT and ITeS companies -- 'Catch them young and make them grow with you'.

While recruiting the right people at entry-level positions is no easy task, with fake resumes, lack of proper training and absence of soft skills adding to the recruiters' worries, making the right choices for middle and senior management positions is a difficult proposition.

Companies in this sector are setting up academies and training centres to grow leaders within their organisation and save them the grind of recruiting from outside. The fact that it helps to cut down attrition rates, is an added bonus.

Tarun Singh, director of Kenexa, a provider of talent management solutions, said, "It is possible to find people for middle-and senior-level management positions. It is just that culture acclimatization becomes an issue."

An adapter of this concept is Satyam Computer Services, which is setting up a School of Leadership to accelerate the process of leadership development and thereby ensure a clear succession plan.

Starting with 5 per cent of the total employee strength, Satyam's school will groom leaders via both classroom sessions and web seminars. The company has also tied up with Harvard Business School Publishing and Universitas 21 Global to conduct six-month certificate programmes.

Termed as Certificate of Global Business Leadership, the programme will hone the global business strategy skills of Satyam professionals over a period of three years.

According to B Ramalinga Raju, founder-chairman of Satyam, financial benefits alone cannot retain an employee. "Our focus is on empowering people and creating conducive environment for growth. We want to build a distributed leadership and Satyam School of Leadership is working towards this end," he added.

Integreon, a company operating in the knowledge process outsourcing space, has also set up an academy working towards the same cause. Apart from training freshers on the technology front, the academy runs modules for leadership development as well.

"A person joining at the middle management level takes a long time to learn the processes and functions of a niche company like ours. Besides, when an employee undergoes a training programme that will facilitate a promotion, he/she gets an incentive to be with the organisation," said Joyce Thorne, director (training), Integreon Academy.